Slashdot Mirror
Linux Tuning Repository
Owain Vaughan writes "Mindcraft's excuse for their results when comparing highly tuned
NT versus vanilla Linux was that there was no
central source of Linux Tuning information.
Well there is now.
Please submit all the Linux tuning articles you can get
hold of to root@vaughan.com"
Hmmm, has entries for x86, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, ARM, m68k...
:-/
Where's ALPHA???
Why does everyone ignore the most mature 64-bit Linux port? Heck, the MIPS port isn't anywhere near complete as the Alpha ports
Do a write up about it or find a HOWTO and send it to them!
It was registered April 27, 1999. It resolves for me. You're not missing much, there's no information there yet, just a request for info.
Add ns1.custard.org to your list of nameservers (/etc/resolv.conf) and you'll be able to access it, but right now there isn't much there, just an overall layout but no real info yet.
Use ns1.custard.org as a DNS and you'll be able to access it properly.
That site is as empty as the one mentioned.
Agreed, and they could also get a goddamn spell checker!!!
Maybe you guys should spend more time helping the site instead of bitching about his root email. Obviously this person is competent enough to use root as his user and not make mistakes, unlike some of you.
Both this site and the one at nl.linux.org seem to be basically empty. It seems to me that both these sites are just shells waiting for someone else to do the work for them. Community involvement is good, but you really should provide a base of information as a start point, if only to demonstrate the quality of information the site is going to have. They could have used /. type software and made it an open posting forum with moderation.
May be he uses an alias... or a .forward file and/or procmail .. to forward that mail to some other user account. I never read mail as root on my debian system , everything goes to the user who supposedly has the root ..
My God, how many sites have we seen posted on Slashdot that have no content? I'm getting sick of these Linux 'feel good' posts that give you a warm fuzzy feeling about how great Linux is until you go to the site and all you see is a fucking template with nothing in it! I understand that it takes visitors to submit "articles" for the site. But it seems to me like whenever there's a need for a "linux site", someone throws some crap up with nothing in it, and expects the linux community to do all the work. Unfortunately, that's not how the "open source" concept works. First you release a workable program (or in this case, website) that people would already want to use, THEN you ask them to help make modifications.
This is a great idea, a "central" tuning knowledge base. I know there are another half dozen out there already, but if one group decided to collect from the rest, like a meta page that's great! Now however, first off, they need a mission statement, if people go there thinking it is the sum of knowledge about linux tuning, we're in even more trouble. Also, the site layout is good, but the quality is poor. I HOPE I'm not the only one who knows that "optimization" is not a word, and "optimisation" is DEFINATELY not a word. Let's try "For all of your optimizing needs" *sigh*
-H
d'oh!
p rise
somehow despite the preview the address tag got mangled here it is again:
http://area51.upsu.plym.ac.uk/~betty/LinuxEnter
Aaron.
The haven't yet put any tuning info up yet.
I imagine alpha will appear pretty quickly once
someone sends in some alpha tuning info. (Aside
from the obvious -- tune your Linux distro up
by binning you intel crap and using alpha)
Like sticking root@localhost in the email entries
of your browser???
I have always wondered what the big deal about logging in as root was about. Why is it so forbidden and dangerous? Are you afraid you will accidently delete something or fubar it?
In general, there's nothing magical about the name "root". You could assign any name you wanted to UID 0 -- Even set up multiple username/password pairs for the same UID if you wanted to. The entire world doesn't run RedHat out of the box.
Don't assume that someone else must be stupid just because you don't understand what they're doing.
-D
dcross@cryogen.com
Wouldn't it be cool if you tried to join forces with the project (mentioned above) in which they are filling the CVS with info?
They could shine with their expertice and you could shine with your web skills - and we'd all have one hell of e repository!
The last thing we need is NotInventedHere-syndrome... IMHO
The root address should _already_ be aliased
to a normal account, since root should never
read email anyway. Since it is aliased, why not
just use the address? Some spammers filter it
out to avoid the wrath of clueful UNIX admins.
Face it, they gave the lamest M$/Mindcraft gave the lamest attempt at asking for help. See they were Windows NT experts so they didn't need any help. This test was hogwash. There only attempt at help was to email Redhat. That is simply pathetic. If you were to do this in reverse with a Linux company running the competition, do you think they would have gotten help by emailing Micro$oft without paying them? No way! Even if this site existed they still wouldn't have found it. They only went to the most widely known Linux site to ask for help. This will never be the most known site. This test
makes me hate Micro$oft more and more that I think about it.
I'll agree that a performance tuning site is important for those seeking to squeeze the absolute best performance out of their machines.
I'm left wondering, however, whether the existance of this site would have made any difference whatsoever in the Mindcraft testing. Face it, Mindcraft did a hatchet job on Linux, and no amount of available documentation anywhere would have made a difference. We've already seen blatant DE-TUNING of the machine. These things weren't done mistakenly!
Ok, after seeing the site, I was a bit dissapointed. Layout is ok, but it looks like hell, and there is VERY little content on any of the listed daemons. HOWEVER, it's a great idea, and I'm sure if we all contribute our knowledge, it will become a great place for tuning info. I do feel, in the meantime, they need to put a !Mission Statement! on the sucker, so people will know it is still an effort, and not an established full-fledged site. If people go there thinking it's the sum of knowledge about linux tuning, we'll lose even more face. I believe they jumped into the war without their rifle.
-H
if you need tuning info, check out the m$ resource kits. tons of information in those about tuning their software. also, there are some excellent newsgroups and list-servs run by/for microsoft. if you're looking for web-based tuning, check out activeserverpages.com and 15seconds.com and take a look at their list-servs. s2n ain't so great on some, but other are wonderful (fastCode, c++ component building)
I am personally building an Enterprise (meta?) Howto ( here), and I'm working with some guys on a knowledge base and other documenation.
It would be nice if someone could put together a page on documentation projects currently in progress/infancy - mail me at betty@area51.upsu.plym.ac.uk with any info on projects or if you want info on projects - if I don't hear anything I'll put together my own documentation/Knowledgebase in progress page at the above address.
Laters.. Aaron (TheJackal/TJ)- where's my cookie gone?
There are some OS tuning resources in the "Optimization and Tuning of the OS" section of Sys.Admin. page of Gary's Encyclopedia".
http://www.nl.linux.org/linuxperf/
this is an awesome site for linux tips
check it out
http://portico.org
-xyster
Well, in theory Microsoft themselves would be this repository. It's certainly a reasonable assumption, after all, they made the OS, right?
Getting any information out of it is a whole other matter. I'm sure they give preference, though, if you're an "indepedant" testing firm that consistently proves every other product in the world is horrible compared to Microsoft products.
Maybe if I was a huge corporation I could get attention from them, but I'm not...
:)). A company I work at, very, very large, has been struggling with MS for about two years just to get a bit shaved off the price for Office 97 (many thousands of licenses needed), and a deal like having employees be able to install it at home as well as at work (Lotus was very accomidating here). MS just recently budged, saying they'd take off a few dollars (I forget, but like 20%, not much) when we buy a second license for them. And that's just for Office Standard (no Access), it's regular full price for Professional.
Trust me, since no company is the size of MS, they don't care who you are (unless you're a competitor
And don't even get me started on tech support for anything Windows. We only have a 1-900 number to call, even then it's useless. Everybody has just become accustomed to frequent reloading of NT. A three year lease on the hardware would expect two to three reloads during that time. I just find it amazing they are so pro-MS through all this. And it amazes me how much money the throw into ways of more "efficiently" reloading the OS, since many problems are hopeless to try and resolve.
Posted by Uncle Humph:
G uide/ for example.
http://www.antarctic.penguincomputing.com/Linux
I agree. If I were going to set up a new Linux site like this, I'd have done my own research and put up as much as I could find so that the site wasn't empty at first.
...
People are much more likely to send you information if they see that you've already done some work and that the site is going somewhere. Who wants to send info to a site that hasn't even bothered to do the first bit of research? It doesn't inspire confidence in the future of the site.
But I guess it's easy to set up a blank site and advertise for people to fill it with content, which is why so many sites start up this way
I'm not sure I want to take seriously advice for tuning my system from a guy who receives his own mail as root.
"When to use root@ e-mail addresses."
;)
jaraxle
and thanks for the compliment on my web design skills :-)
jaraxle
>Running a bunch of processes...real insecure. Thats why you dont do everything as root, not becuase you aren't well versed enough to do so.
Heh, the contradiction that he implies!
"I know what I am doing well enough that I can run as root!"
Except that if you did know what you were doing, you wouldn't run as root!
Laugh him off.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Why put on sites with no content? both should be
taken down. We are not M$ and do no engage in deception. Let a guy who has some KNOWLEDGE about
tuning put up a site not just a guy who can put up a webpage.
Performance tuning information is all over Microsoft's web site. Just go to http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver and then follow the links to the particular functionality you are looking at...
h /overview/FilePerf.asp
as an example:
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/fileprint/tec
There are similar articles available for web servers and other pieces.
Is there an M$ tuning repository? I was not aware of one...
but my experience is that their "knowledge workers" are as a whole unfriendly and unknowledgable.
Maybe if I was a huge corporation I could get attention from them, but I'm not...
Instead we've learned how to make win95/NT work (more-or-less) right on our own. We're pretty good at it, but this can be a problem for a "real" corporation that buys a "supported" OS and expects a corresponding decrease in tech support they must provide internally.
that the biggest corporation in the industry can't do any better than to let me search their website haphazardly. I search for "performance tuning" on www.microsoft.com. Yes, I found some articles. Some were good. Some were idiotic. They weren't particularly well organized.
Does Linux have this problem? To some degree, for those uninitiates who don't know whom/how to ask. When I had a question about video hardware on Suns, I mailed Jim Mintha of UltraLinux. When I had a question about SMBfs support in the kernel, I mailed the maintainer. The documentation that is there is easily organized in howto's on common subjects. And there's a whole community of USENET junkies ready to answer questions as soon as you ask them.
Repositories with papers on tuning specific packages, organized to show you exactly what's available, will help a lot.
Rik van Riel has already started a linux tuning site over at nl.linux.org. Already there are some 50+ folks on the alias with documents starting to fly around the CVS system. Nobody has mentioned this site to us, so what's the deal?
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
For those of you who can't resolve the domain name yet or something, www.tunelinux.com is 193.243.238.236.
-mike kania
Are you looking for the LDP? It's still there (along with the rest of sunsite) at http://metalab.unc.edu. Has never left, AFAIK :) :)
~luge
(A frustrated Blue Devil who is constantly embittered that something as cool as metalab is at a place as lame as UNC-Chapel Hell
IAAL,BIANLY
bad troll, be nice.
Running a bunch of processes as root is kinda insecure. Okay real insecure. Thats why you dont do everything as root, not becuase you aren't well versed enough to do so.
I think I should change my threshold to 1 now. . .
-doobman
The alpha architecture seems to be conspicuous by it's absence!
Too bad, because tuning stuff (compiler flags etc) gets you lots of gains on these machines, and it's really picky about the types of memory accesses etc.
Berating this guy for using a root@ email address is silly and showing a snotty attitude.
Why yes it should be as slow as technet. See, we'll have to organize it in a central searchable hierarchical repository, put in a good fast system, then throw in a buncha sleep() calls as the finishing touch to make it just as slow as technet.
I didn't say "exactly like technet down to the pixel level" did I?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This should be part of a TUNING-HOWTO and put in the LDP. The LDP could also do with some organization too. Something like microsoft technet or support.apple.com would be nice.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Why not just contribute tuning info to the LDP?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If only slashdot would be *selective* about what they post. Merely getting posted as a main article on slashdot will cause something to be hyped , and slashdot should make sure that they aren't unfairly hyping vapourware over a project that is more mature , productive and deserving of publicity.
I got custard.org .
:-(
Guess that's the bad thing about name-based virtual hosts.
D
----
YAUA: Yet Another Ugly American
You weren't referring to the British spelling that I noticed on the site, were you?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
IMHO... If you're an individual who's getting into kernel tuning you already are the sysadmin.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Here's one:
Otherwise, I'm glad someone's doing this to shut off the criticisms from those who are too lazy to visit more than one site for this information. Q: Why should the Apache group need to submit their documentation to someone else for dissemination? Do we bitch about Seagate's drive specs being on a different web site from Western Digitals's???
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You know, I have to wonder just how qualified someone who uses the sysadmin account as an incoming email address is to run any kind of technical Linux site, let alone a tuning site...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I'm not worried about the security implications of telling people about the root account. I'm well aware of the fact that virtually every Unix box has one. What worries me most is the impression it gives to the world to tell people to email you at root instead of a regular account. In my experience, everybody who knows anything at all about system administration tries to minimize their use of the root account. Conversely, the people who use "root" as their primary account instead of creating a non-privledged account are almost by definition inexperienced and/or lazy.
;-)>
I think it's a great idea for the Linux community to have a resource for tuning information. However, if you want that resource to be taken seriously the people running it at least need to look like they know what they are doing.
I don't buy the alias theory. Someone who has managed to get root's mail aliased to some other account also knows that it takes abount 10 seconds to create an arbitrary alias to use for situations like this. Of course, this is all a mooot point since the web page now gives a nice clean alias to use for submitting tips.
Seems like a bad idea to me too. Aside from the numerous security risks that come from using root as a regular account, it implies that the person running this machine is too lazy to even bother creating a non-super account. Or too ignorant to know any better. Either way, it presents a really bad image.
heh - have you been to linuxwarez ??
they have purple links (grey once you visit them) on a black background. That's even harder to read.
I guess ppl don't think about these things when they create pages. I guess they don't look at them either.
-Jae
Actually - if you go to the site, the email link is tunelinux@vaughan.com
Perhaps this is a typo in the article?
-Jae
Aren't we spreading ourselves a little too thin by having all these "helper" sites pop up?
What are we really accomplishing
-Jae
Thank you so much for pointing out that I am not a great speller and make grammatical errors.
That really has a lot to do w/ this post.
-Jae
(lets try this again since I can't type today and keep smacking the wrong keys)
Note : I use "we" as a general pronoun here
What are we really accomplishing by having all these "helper" sites come online - especially when they have little or no content to them?
Wouldn't it make more sense (and maybe this is being done, but it needs to be publicized (sp) a bit better) to have all these ppl who are creating these sites pool their efforts and work on one big site?
Their intentions are definately good - but it's not acheiving the desired goal.
I know if I was a newbie user, I'd want to be able to look one place for all the hints, docs, etc that I needed, rather then having to visit numerous sites to find out one thing.
That's why sunsite was so great - b/c you could find a lot of what you were looking for in one place. But - it's not like that any more (at least I think)
We're trying to pursuade people to move over to linux as their OS of choice - but how easy are we making it for them with these "helper" sites that come on-line, but have no "help" in them.
I think that if everyone invested their time into one unified project, we'd have one helluva documentation/hints site on our hands.
Find a group of people to administer it, find a group to write the scripts (I'd help w/ that part myself), find people for "formalize" all the hints and documents that are submitted, and then put them online.
We're moving forward w/ providing documentation, but we're moving backwards as well.
Note : Again - remember that I use "we" as a general pronoun, and it doesn't necessarily refer to people who read this site - it's more of a linux population as a whole
-Jae
tunelinux seems a bit sparse on content. It seems more like a template for a new site, than a ready to launch site. The links I followed all seemed to point to simple descriptions of the various daemons and architectures. They could have seeded it with at least the Apache Performance notes or the more specific OS performance notes already published on the main Apache site. Not to mention the fact that they could have perused the contents of the many howtos listed at Linuxberg among many other places. It looks like a good starting point though, and I'm sure it will become a useful resource once more content is provided. It is a nice design, but "Content is King."
Just seems like a bad idea to me.
If you are aliasing root e-mail to another account in order to receive editorial submissions then I think you are better off picking another name, like editor, or something.
Unless, of course, you think it looks cool to use root, in which case you should consider that it might look really lame to others.
In any case, I think it is great that someone took the initiative to get this going.
----fffst --- (sound of flamethrower being lit...)
the information is centrally located and that everything there is theoretically authoritative.
What a bunch of crock. Authoritative perhaps, but of dubious value. I choose not to waste /. bandwidth describing the numerous (50+) times over 4-5 years I received tech info from the web site, from an expensive support contract, or other forms of so-called help, that was either just plain wrong. Or, more often -- designed and obviously driven by marketing concerns to disquise the fact that much of their software was just plain crap. I can't easily count the number of times that M$ software didn't conform to pre-existing and published standards, resulting in problems for my clients, only to have M$ support blame the problem on the other software which was (their words)"obviously the culprit because M$ only publishes quality software."[If I hadn't had clients depending on those jerk answers, I'd would have probably "ROFL-MAO" (rolled on the floor and laughed my A$$ off.)
---flame thrower off---
Now then, often the Linux crowd is a little harsh in providing the answers to those who don't know all the answers already (be nice to the new folks please!!), but at least we put the info out in plain sight, and works in an open arena to fix the problems, rather than playing the FUD blame game.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I think Eric Raymond made a point in at least one of those two papers (Cathedral and Bazaar and Homesteading the Noosphere) that open source projects don't tend to succeed unless they start from a functional project. (Mozilla is a good example of this; it has required a lot more effort to get off the ground because there was not a functional product to start with) So I don't think "misunderstanding" is not the problem, more like "ignoring" - like, this part sounds cool, but this part sounds like work, so forget about it.
:)
On the other hand, what do you consider a working product for a web site? The site in question has doubtless gleaned some useful information from this discussion, and if he has half a brain will spend the next day or so tracking info down and updating his page.
On the other hand, unless he's really dedicated, it's liable to peter out after a month or so. This kind of project requires hard work for a long time to be successful.
On the other hand - by now I'm a quadruped - thats all I wanted to say
I am dissapointed that this site is Live and yet doesn't contain any useful information what so ever.
By publicizing this site in this way, the author is accumulating quite a few pointers to useful information. The author demonstrates some level of commitment and credibility by investing time and $$$ to create this site (though admittedly not a WHOLE lot).
How is this going to co-ordinate itself with the kernel-doc effort being placed by riel@humbolt.nl.linux.org?
Ask the site maintainer - how is anyone else supposed to know the answer to this question? Oh wait - you didn't mean to be helpful, did you? You just wanted to criticize.
Mindcraft/Microsoft will be laughing at this site. And it will fuel their FUD that everything under Linux is Alpha/Beta software in the public domain.
What this author is proposing will not spring into view fully formed. It will take a lot of work and effort by a lot of people because no one has all the answers. The author clearly felt that the best way to grow his site was to go public as soon as he could. With a lot of work and a little luck, it will grow up.
I think it should be taken off until the author knows at least some links to Kernel tuning sites - the author could at least put up some "Under Construction" signs...
Once again, you demonstrate your desire not to help but to criticize. What are those links? Do you know where such information is? Why aren't you sharing it? The site's author is trying to be helpful; I see no evidence of that from you.
I, too, was disappointed at the lack of information on this site, but I could see that it was a work in progress. It takes a real jackass to say that because something isn't finished it isn't worth spending time on.
I see your point, but I was really speaking more on telling the individual what daemons can be disabled and how to do it, etc. Things which will optimize Linux for a single user with an Internet account, rather than a LAN user.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
Well, it is about time. I get a lot of information from the Linux How-Tos, but we do need to get more central repositories for Linux knowledge. Looks like the site may have been /.ed, but it may be the proxy server here. Will it contain info for individual users as well as sysadmins?
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
I am dissapointed that this site is Live and yet doesn't contain any useful information what so ever.
How is this going to co-ordinate itself with the kernel-doc effort being placed by riel@humbolt.nl.linux.org ?
Mindcraft/Microsoft will be laughing at this site. And it will fuel their FUD that everything under Linux is Alpha/Beta software in the public domain.
I think it should be taken off until the author knows at least some links to Kernel tuning sites - the author could at least put up some "Under Construction" signs...
Assuming this site gets useful content soon - has anyone told the people at Mindcraft about it? Seeing as how it is in response to their 'complaints' more or less.
-cpd
isn't this just showing at least one of the ways that the free software community works - no one owns it so there tends not to be centralisation
/. could be that site!
of control or even resources. Instead we get a flush of people doing similar things and the best of them survive. Often several reasonable projects fold together to make a really good one. Don't knock it - it works, even if in someways its about as efficient as plain standard evolution it has the same result in that the best adapted survive.
I think that all of these efforts should probably have a comments button for each page so that each vistor can add to the knowlege base - only solution would be to have a faq-o-matic style site which just grows and self edits by rating peoples comments - in fact
It's pretty easy to tell when some code is worthy of being released ("Ok, it does a reasonable subset of what it should ultimately do."), and I think it's also pretty easy to tell when a site is ready to go "live", although maybe it's less easy to give a concrete definition. I'd say it's somewhere beyond the point of having a few stubs and pointers to external sites.
You're a suburbanite.
someone gave out an ip of
http://193.243.238.236
but this resolves to custard.org
Funny how some can get this but not others. Tought it was my proxy but must be some nameserver issue somewhere.
Technet and all of Microsoft.com is so slow it gives me reason to call them Microsloth. It takes forever to load anything on a regular modem line. Too many "see what I can do with Java/HTML" graphics. And the slowest download times on patches/updates.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
>Does Linux have this problem? To some degree, for >those uninitiates who don't know whom/how to ask. >When I had a question about video hardware on >Suns, I mailed Jim Mintha of UltraLinux. When I >had a question about SMBfs support in the kernel, >I mailed the maintainer.
Unfortunately, this model does not scale very well. I work in a support organisation, and having one or two subject experts doesn't work very well when every man and his dog is after them for answers or they decide to get sick or go on vacation.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
looking up www.tunelinux.com
Official name: www.tunelinux.com
IP address: 193.243.238.236
It seems to resolve now, but it didn't the first time I tried it
Now no 'suit would be able to whine about not finding tuning tips for Linux! :-)
Of course, it needs to be filled with all kinds of tips, and the search engine needs to work, but hey! It's a good idea!
Kudos to them.
Now, if only I had some tuning tip for them...
Who?